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6–16 Privileged Architecture Library Code
Alpha 21264/EV67 Hardware Reference Manual
Translation Buffer (TB) Fill Flows
• The conditional branch is placed in the code so that all of the MTPR instructions
are issued and retired or none of them are issued and retired. This allows the TB fill
hardware to update the TB whenever it sees the retiring of PTE1 and to ignore
writes to TAG0/TAG1/PTE0/PTE1 in the interim between the issuing of those
writes and a retire of PTE1.
• As an alternative to using I_CTL[TB_MB_EN] = 1 to enforce read ordering,
I_CTL[TB_MB_EN] can be set to 0 and the PALcode may use a bit in the PTE to
indicate whether to do an explicit MB.
The flow example in 6-5 shows the code using pte_eco and the code not using
pte_eco. It assumes the following:
– In a multi-processor configuration, if pte_eco is not enabled, it is necessary to
enable tb_mb_en.
– In a uni-processor configuration, if pte_eco is not enabled, it is not necessary to
enable tb_mb_en.
– At no time should pte_eco and tb_mb_en both be enabled.
• The value in DTB_PTEx[GH] determines whether the scoreboard mechanism alone
is sufficient to guarantee all subsequent load/store instructions (implicit readers of
the DTB) are ordered relative to the creation of a new DTB entry; whether all sub-
sequent loads and stores to the loaded address will hit in the DTB.
– If DTB_PTEx[GH] is zero, the scoreboard mechanism alone is sufficient.
– If DTB_PTEx[GH] is not zero, the scoreboard mechanism alone is not suffi-
cient (although this is not a problem). In this case, the new DTB entry is not
visible to subsequent load/store instructions until after the MTPR DTB_PTE1
retires.
Issuing a HW_RET_STALL instead of a HW_RET would guarantee ordering,
but is not necessary. Code executes correctly without the stall although execu-
tion might result in two passes through the DTB miss flow, rather than one,
because the re-execution of the memory operation after the first DTB miss
might miss again.
This behavior is functionally correct because DTB loads that tag-match an
existing DTB entry are ignored by the 21264/EV67 and the second DTB miss
execution will load exactly the same entry as the first.
6.9.2 ITB Fill
Figure 6–6 shows the ITB miss instructions flow.
Figure 6–6 ITB Miss Instructions Flow Example
hw_mfpr r4, EV6__IVA_FORM ; (0L) get vpte address
hw_mfpr r23, EV6__EXC_ADDR ; (0L) get exception address
lda r6, ^x0FFF(r31) ; (xU) create mask for prot
bis r31, r31, r31 ; (xU) fill out fetch block
trap__itb_miss_vpte:
hw_ldq/v r4, (r4) ; (xL) get vpte
and r4, r6, r5 ; (xL) get prot bits
blt p_misc, trap__i1to1 ; (xU) 1-to-1 => branch